T.J. Watt returned an interception 35 yards for a touchdown against the Falcons in Week 1, and that single play pushed him past 10 career interceptions to go with 100-plus career sacks. Per Yahoo Sports, the only other player in NFL history to reach both marks since individual sacks became an official stat in 1982 is Julius Peppers.
Watt’s pick-six against the Falcons put him in a club of two.
Atlanta was mid-scramble through the Falcons’ quarterback competition when Watt made it worse, picking off a throw and running it back to help seal the Steelers’ 20-13 win. He added 2.0 sacks and multiple tackles for loss to the pick-six in the same afternoon. Per NBC Sports, that performance was enough to win him his ninth career AFC Defensive Player of the Week award, his first since 2024.
Nine Defensive Player of the Week awards ties three Hall of Famers, Chris Doleman, Bruce Smith and Lawrence Taylor, for the most in league history. All three are already enshrined in Canton. Watt is still playing.
Doleman, Smith and Taylor got their busts without needing a stat pairing this specific to argue the case for them. Their era decided they were inner circle and moved on. Watt has had to do it sack by sack, interception by interception, until the numbers physically ran out of room to be ignored.
The thing nobody’s talking about is what happens to a player’s reputation when the evidence outruns the narrative.
Watt has been treated for years like a good problem for opposing tackles, a guy who racks up sacks and gets discussed the way you discuss weather patterns: impressive, expected, background noise. I spent two years freelancing sports pieces for fifty dollars a byline, math where every single clip had to argue for itself before an editor believed you belonged in the section. There was no shortcut in that system, just accumulation until somebody had to admit the work was real.
Watt hasn’t needed to argue anything with numbers like these, and he shouldn’t have had to build a case this large just to get filed where he already belongs. The gap between Watt’s résumé and his reputation was never about production. It’s about which players get filed as inner circle before the stat sheet forces the issue, and which ones keep compiling evidence season after season because they never got one signature moment loud enough to skip the line.
The league office noticed, at least publicly:
https://twitter.com/NFL/status/2100955502062833719
A tweet from the NFL’s own account isn’t a bust in Canton, but it’s the sound of an institution running out of ways to undersell somebody. Go check the rest of our NFL coverage and try to find another defender doing this much while getting talked about this quietly.
Peppers waited a long time for company. Watt got here early.
